How Hardware Companies Determine Their Linux Base

[RealNC]

No, the only way to get Nvidia to notice is to beat them over the head by purchasing AMD hardware because on their lack of OSS support. Don't get distracted by the VDPAU cookie.

Get NVidia to notice what exactly? Their drivers are top notch. If someone needs to notice, it's AMD with their fglrx, not NVidia.

[tuke81]

No, the only way to get Nvidia to notice is to beat them over the head by purchasing AMD hardware because on their lack of OSS support. Don't get distracted by the VDPAU cookie.

Would not make a difference, main reason why nvidia makes linux drivers are professional markets(quadro, tesla. For them drivers have to work). To making drivers for geforces too is then easy for them.

[ssam]

some ideas:
you could enable smolt or popcon (debian and ubuntu). and sign up at linuxcounter. those help people get estimates of number of linux users.

buy computers from vendors that preinstall linux. http://nakedcomputers.org/ has a fairly big list. when these vendors do large orders from the manufactures they will talk to them about compatibility and drivers.

fill in those registration card that you get with hardware.

email everyone in the supply chain and ask them if a device supports linux. they may not know, or just say 'we dont support linux', but if enough people do it then they may look into it. look at how successful the organic and fairtrade food movements are.

[speculatrix]

http://counter.li.org/

I also allowed opensuse to install SMOLT on my computers.

[Nobu]

Probably wouldn't have much effect, but I just had an idea for a UA string:

"<BROWSER> <OS> (<KERNEL> <KVERSION>) [ARCH]"
e.g.: "Chrome Fedora (Linux 2.6.38)", or "Firefox 4 / Fedora (Linux 2.6.38) x86_64"

Short, informative, and not verbose. ;-)

[monraaf]

Don't get distracted by the VDPAU cookie.

Why not? There are plenty of people who don't really care that much about 3D and games and stuff but do care about video decode acceleration. VDPAU gives you that, sure their drivers are closed source but so is AMD's competing XvBA implementation. On the open source side there's nothing on both sides.

[pingufunkybeat]

Why not? There are plenty of people who don't really care that much about 3D and games and stuff but do care about video decode acceleration. VDPAU gives you that, sure their drivers are closed source but so is AMD's competing XvBA implementation. On the open source side there's nothing on both sides.

Not quite yet, but there is working XvMC for r600+ hardware and a h264 state tracker in progress.

That said, it will probably work just as well with nouveau as it will with radeon after a bit of tweaking.

[pingufunkybeat]

Get NVidia to notice what exactly?

The demand for free drivers and open specs.

Nvidia could get away with being the only major hardware manufacturer with completely closed specs for a while because they were the only ones with reasonable Linux support.

This is slowly changing. r300g has top notch performance, the r600+ drivers are maturing and work is starting on optimisations, OpenGL 3 support in Mesa is virtually around the corner, video decoding is on the way for Gallium3d.

None of this will probably beat the blob in pure performance, but it's bound to be close enough that most people will not care, and will not wish to deal with installing secretive binaries if they have open drivers which work out of the box.

[AnonymousCoward]

Hmmm, I believe John Bridgman said here that even if they had the whole nix* home market it would not cover the costs of their OSS team, so I doubt Nvidia (w/sh)ould care.

[bridgman]

Hmmm, I believe John Bridgman said here that even if they had the whole nix* home market it would not cover the costs of their OSS team, so I doubt Nvidia (w/sh)ould care.

I'm not sure which comment you're referencing, but that doesn't sound quite right. Best guess is that I said something along the lines of "even if we had the whole *nix home market it would not cover the costs of developing an OSS stack comparable to the proprietary driver", or something like that.